Jett, Cait and I had a great time in Hanoi in mid-March of 2016 — a year and three-quarters before the launch of wokester terror. Why am I mentioning this now? Because Facebook brought it up…

Three and three-quarter years ago a few friends joined Tatiana and I in celebrating our June 2017 marriage at The Little Door, a Parisian-style brasserie.

We returned to that Third Street establishment last night for a light dinner. We love the cozy vibe, the blue paint, the fireplace and the candlelight, and the food is always pretty good. And the conversational levels are low so you can actually hear each other.

We had a nice, peaceful 60 or 70 minutes, but then a group of seven or eight Zoomers came along and sat down near us, and before long they started shriek-laughing…good God. We knew it was time to leave.

Friendo: “What do you think Bill Maher meant the other night when he said ‘don’t make me watch Nomadland‘?”

HE: “That he watched (part of) it and found it tiresome? Or that a friend of his did?”

There’s a certain pushback sentiment about Nomadland that’s currently being shared. It’s just not a wildly popular film among smart, discerning film sophistos. The Nomadland narrative is a perfect fit, of course, and everyone agrees that it fits into the presently-constituted zeitgeist, but on the merits of the film alone, your middle-aged, think-for-themselves cool kidz are saying “overpraised,” “a Covid movie,” “calm down” and so forth.

Yes, it’ll still win the Best Picture Oscar, but my God, would I love it if either The Trial of the Chicago 7 or Sound of Metal were to win instead!

There’s nothing glorious and soul-cleansing about being executed by Roman arrows. Plus it would hurt like hell, and death probably wouldn’t come quickly. Plus one of the archers might aim poorly and shoot me or my fiance in the eye. Or I might get an arrow in the groin.

If I been in the sandals of Marcellus (Richard Burton), a confirmed Christian and deeply in love with the gentle Diana (Jean Simmons), and if Caligula (Jay Robinson) had demanded that I renounce the teachings of the executed carpenter known as Yeshua of Nazareth and the nascent religion he’d recently come to stand for, I would say “damn straight, your excellence.”

What difference would a few words make one way or the other? It’s deeds that count. The court of Caligula is pure political theatre, and therefore meaningless. Moral relativism is the only way to travel.

HE solution in a nutshell: (a) Renounce Christ out of one side of my mouth, (b) Diana and I are then free to move to Capri and live a life of Christian leisure (mountain hikes, sailing, swimming + eating dates, grapes and fresh fish), and (c) Caligula would soon be killed anyway by the Praetorian Guard.

What glorious purpose would Diana and I serve by going to our deaths? You know the answer. The answer is “fuck this jazz.” The secondary answer is “martyrdom might look like an act of transcendence at the end of a 1953 20th Century Fox release, but in real life it isn’t worth it.” Because you know what? When you’re dead it’s simply lights out…no choir, no shining cosmic light, no Godly white clouds…you’re just dead.”

Smart, middle-class, middle-budget “heart” movies like As Good As It Gets (’97) are gone from the landscape…erased from Hollywood’s communal creative unconscious. When I first saw it 23 and 1/3 years ago I naturally presumed that the actual Harold Ramis (1944 – 2014) bore an incidental resemblance (if that) to the doctor he played in James L. Brooks‘ dramedy. I nonetheless fell in love with Ramis after I saw this scene, and I’ve never been able to shake this impression. In my memory he’ll always be an incredibly kind and caring person.

It’s okay for Hollywood Elsewhere to post opinionated headlines and somewhat slanted stories because this is an attitude-and-opinion site — I yam what I yam. But the trades, like your mainstream news sites (N.Y. Times, WashPost, TheWrap, USA Today, Daily Beast), are obliged to present a fair-minded, pseudo-balanced front.

Alas, in stories about the CBS Sunday Morning/Paramount + interview with Woody Allen that began streaming today, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter haven’t even attempted to offer a semblance of even-toned coverage. Neither publication is making the slightest effort to seem “fair” about anything — their editors are clearly Allen haters and in the tank for Dylan Farrow, and they don’t care if anyone gets that impression or not.

It is particularly egregious, I feel, that Variety‘s headline states that in the Paramount + interview Allen “Rehashes Old Arguments” in his defense of himself regarding the 1992 sexual abuse allegation.

Imagine if, say, a witness to last May’s George Floyd murder were to offer recollections of what he/she saw and heard to 60 Minutes, say, and a mainstream newspaper were to report the next day that the witness had “rehashed old observations.” The editors and perhaps the publisher of that newspaper would be forced to resign within 48 hours, and the paper itself would thereafter be regarded as inherently racist. There would be calls to shut it down or at least change the name.

There’ve been hundreds of first-rate bad guys in films over the decades, but most of the time they’ve been cast opposite an equally dominating (or at least equally charismatic) good-person character. It’s relatively rare for snarly shitheads to be the lead figure in a film without a balancing good guy (or good woman) with a similar impact or a similar number of lines and close-ups, etc.

Rip Torn‘s Maury Dann, a selfish, scurvy, low-rent country singer in Daryl Duke‘s Payday (’72), was such a fellow — one of the most deplorable lead characters in motion-picture history.

HE readers are hereby requested to recall other leading nogoodniks. Just remember that they have to be stand-alone leads without any counter-balancing good guys or gals. This means that Paul Newman‘s Hud Bannon doesn’t qualify; ditto Kirk Douglas‘s Chuck Tatum in Ace in the Hole.

Dustin Hoffman‘s performance in Ishtar (’87) was definitely diverting or at the very least a very good try. His inhabiting of “Chuck Clark,” a hyper, fatally untalented songwriter, wasn’t lazy or smug or anything less than jockey-on-the-horse. He and Warren Beatty gave it hell, and they somehow overcame the idea of two 40ish guys being doomed to fail…they made an unfunny situation into a no-laugh-funny classic. The fact that it wasn’t funny made it “funny.”

This aside, Tom Brueggemann‘s declaration that Chuck is Hoffman’s “best” all-time performance is silly.

Here are Hoffman’s 15 best screen performances, in this order: (1) Ratzo Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, (2) Max Dembo in Straight Time, (3) David Sumner in Straw Dogs, (4) “Babe” Levy in Marathon Man, (5) Ben Braddock in The Graduate, (6) Carl Bernstein in All The President’s Men, (7) “Mumbles” in Dick Tracy (8) Ted Kramer in Kramer vs. Kramer, (9) Raymond Babbit in Rain Man, (10) Bernard Jaffe in I Heart Huckabees, (11) Louis Degg in Papillon, (12) Bernie Focker in Meet the Fockers, (13) Walt “Teach” Teacher in American Buffalo, (13) Michael Dorsey in Tootsie, (14) Jack Crabb in Little Big Man and…I’m not even sure I can call Chuck Clarke his 15th best performance. I’m really don’t know if I can do that.

I didn’t care for his Lenny Bruce performance in Lenny — he tried to make a snappy, occasionally corrosive comic into lovable and endearing nice guy. I know I’m supposed to love his Robert Evans-like performance in Wag The Dog but it didn’t do it for me.

Remember the Criterion teal gremlins?…the vandals who radically distorted the color palettes of four significant 20th Century classics — Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Teorema, Brian DePalma‘s Sisters, John Schlesinger‘s Midnight Cowboy and Ron Shelton‘s Bull Durham?

(DVD Beaver’s Gary Tooze recently claimed to have noticed “some minor teal infiltration” on Criterion’s Amores perros Bluray, so that would make five.)

Well, the teal meanies are back, except now they’ve shifted gears and are vandalizing with dark green tinting. The current victim is Bong Joon-ho‘s Memories of Murder. This new Criterion travesty pops on 4.20.21.

I know nothing except what I’m seeing on DVD Beaver, and the visual evidence is…you tell me.

Let me get this straight: Last July Lee Cowan, a national correspondent and substitute anchor for CBS Sunday Morning, sat down with Woody Allen for some kind of in-depth interview. The discussion presumably included the 1992 Dylan Farrow sexual abuse allegation. And then Cowan and CBS Sunday Morning “sat” on the Allen interview for seven or eight months.

And now it’s airing on Sunday, 3.28 (i.e., tomorrow) on Paramount Plus “as part of a broader CBS Sunday Morning package,” according to Variety‘s Brian Steinberg.

In short, Allen will say whatever but won’t be commenting on the content of HBO’s Allen v. Farrow, which has only just aired. May I ask “why the hell not”? Allen has explained his side of things quite thoroughly (particularly in “Apropos of Nothing“, which came out last March), but how is it comprehensive to run an interview that’s almost eight months old when the recently premiered Allen v. Farrow is one everyone’s mind right now?

CBS is claiming that the interview “represents Allen’s first in-depth television interview in nearly three decades.”

I respected much of Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods, but I was basically mixed. I was okay with the first half, and felt especially moved by a dazzling montage approach that drew parallels between the Vietnam era and last summer’s BLM protests. But I lost patience during the sloppily-written third act and bailed. At best it’s an in-and-outer.

The hard fact of the matter is that Da 5 Bloods never generated much award-season heat. I knew it was finished when it failed to make the BAFTA Long List. Delroy Lindo‘s performance won critical favor but he was elbowed aside by the tragic passing of Chadwick Boseman.

Any way you slice it Da 5 Bloods has been pretty much forgotten by award-season voters. And especially by Joe and Jane Popcorn.

The IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes user ratings tell a tale. The Netflix release currently has a 6.5 IMDB rating (from a total of 42,157 votes) and the RT rating is a lousy 54%.

And yet last July Da 5 Bloods was the top vote-getter in a Best of 2020 critics poll from World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy. And more recently it was ranked #5 on a Best Movies of 2020 list via criticstop10.com.

How do we square this with the schmoes? With somewhere between 50% and 66% of non-pro viewers on the IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes saying “naahh, forget it”? It’s like the critics saw a different film or something.

Is the disparity due to average viewers lacking…what, exceptional perception or sensitivity or, you know, being dumb clods? Or is it because film critics live on their own dweeb planet? Or because they felt heavily pressured last summer to vote for a POC film and thereby avoid being tagged as insufficiently woke? In short, did they vote for Spike’s film out of political-cultural cowardice?

To go by a 3.11.21 summary, Caitlan Flanagan‘s Atlantic cover story (“Private Schools Are Indefensible“) is about deploring the usual-usual…i.e., rich folks have it better than the rest of us.

But on last night’s Real Time with Bill Maher, I heard Flanagan expand upon this by citing a tendency of today’s elite private schools to try and “turn your child into a Baby Marxist,” or more precisely a nascent woke terrorist.

Similar ground was covered in Bari Weiss‘s “The Miseducation of America’s Elites,” posted on her Substack feed over two weeks ago:

“If You Publish My Name It Would Ruin My Life”

“This Harvard-Westlake parents’ group is one of many organizing quietly around the country to fight what it describes as an ideological movement that has taken over their schools. This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen of these dissenters — teachers, parents, and children — at elite prep schools in two of the bluest states in the country: New York and California.

“The parents in the backyard say that for every one of them, there are many more, too afraid to speak up. ‘I’ve talked to at least five couples who say: I get it. I think the way you do. I just don’t want the controversy right now,’ related one mother. They are all eager for their story to be told — but not a single one would let me use their name. They worry about losing their jobs or hurting their children if their opposition to this ideology were known.

“’The school can ask you to leave for any reason,’ said one mother at Brentwood, another Los Angeles prep school. ‘Then you’ll be blacklisted from all the private schools and you’ll be known as a racist, which is worse than being called a murderer.’”